"Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever."— Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen

A Letter to the Author of Snow Crash
Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Dear Mr. Stephenson,

I have just finished reading the first half of your incredibly engaging, tremendously stylish and mostly-awesomely paced novel, Snow Crash, and I think it's one of the greatest things I've ever read. But it seems that for some reason, the edition that I have ends rather abruptly. You see, the slapdash, thrown-together ending I read can't be the actual end to the book, otherwise you will have squandered one of the most brilliant openings of a science fiction story ever.

The story of Hiro Protagonist, Y.T. and Raven is, I'm sure, a thousand-page monster epic that does justice to its author's vision of a dystopic future where the cyber-world is no longer safe. I will avoid spoilers since I am writing this letter to you on my blog, Mr. Stephenson, but I'm sure your actual book doesn't end on page 468.

I'm sure anyone brilliant enough to write those first four-hundred-some pages can do better than those last fifty or so. I know that the version I read must be incomplete, because it's just a fake ending in the middle of a larger epic, because one of the most original and fantastically-told tales of the world's greatest swordsman and the man with an atom bomb wired to him ends in a triumphant blaze of glory, not because it felt like it ran out of steam.

The Red Bull Diary is the personal pulpit and intellectual dumping-ground for its author, an amateur game designer, professional programmer, political centrist and incurable skeptic. The Red Bull Diary is gaming, game design, politics, development, geek culture, and other such nonsense.